The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East

by Sandy Tolan

Israelis had narrowly avoided their own civil war in late June when Ben-Gurion ordered Haganah forces to blow up an Irgun ship, the Altalena, under the command of Menachem Begin. The ship was carrying arms for Irgun militia members, but Ben-Gurion insisted all military direction come under the command of the Haganah and its successor, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

Sheikh Mustafa had been mayor of this town for twenty-nine years.

He had recently ended his long reign, and now the town was governed by the head of another prominent family,

gallabiyas,

keffiyehs,

sumac;

Perhaps thirty thousand people from al-Ramla and Lydda staggered through the hills that day.

On July 15, before the march from al-Ramla and Lydda was over, David Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary: "The Arab Legion has wired that there are 30,000 refugees moving along the road between Lydda and Ramla, who are infuriated with the Legion. They're demanding bread. They should be taken across the Jordan River"—into Abdullah's kingdom and away from the new state of Israel.

The next morning, trucks from the Arab Legion took the Khairis and the Tajis to Ramallah. They reached the crest of a hill just west of the city. Below them lay a vast bowl: the valley of Ramallah. The city had long been a Christian hill town and cool summer haven for Arabs from the Levant to the Gulf. Now tens of thousands of refugees milled about, stunned and humiliated, looking for food and determined to return home.

Bulgaria's anti-Fascist parties forged a left-Democratic governing coalition, the Fatherland Front.

Some Jews dreamed of the new Bulgarian state they would help build after Fascism, but others were already thinking about Palestine.

Zionism, the political movement devoted to the emigration of European Jews to the Holy Land, had taken hold in Bulgaria in the early 1880s, just as the n...

Bulgarian Jews established Har Tuv, one of the earliest Zionist settlements in Palestine. That same June, Theodor Herzl, the Zionist leader, stopped in Sofia en route to Istanbul on the Orient Express, to a triumphant reception at the train station.

Herzl, whose book The Jewish State laid out the vision of a "Promised Land" where "we can live as free men on our own soil," was already a hero to Jews in Bulgaria.

he was called "the Jewish Jules Verne" and a "crazy careerist."

Bulgaria, however, Herzl was praised as "the new apostle of the new Jewish nationalism."

Bulgarian Jews would recall reading about the "land without people for a people without land."

Debates in these pages centered on whether Jews should learn Hebrew in preparation for emigration to Palestine or stay with Ladino, the Judeo Spanish mother tongue of the Sephardic Jews.

then they established the Palestinski Komitet, which advocated aliyah, or Jewish emigration to Palestine.

For many Bulgarians, Jews included, the defeat of the Nazis meant that the sacrifice of the Partizans in the Rhodope and Balkan Mountains had not been for naught.

Solia's cousin Yitzhak Yitzhaki, was the first in the family to leave. Yitzhaki had returned from the

Yitzhaki's father had connections with the officer in charge of the Sliven headquarters. Soon Yitzhaki was discharged, and near the end of 1944 he quietly left Bulgaria, traveling overland on the Orient Express, the same train Theodor Herzl had ridden half a century earlier, through Istanbul and Syria to Palestine.

For Ben-Gurion, young men like Yitzhaki were the pioneers for a huge migration to follow.

The Jewish Agency, still under British rule in Palestine, had become in many ways a de facto sovereign government.

By now, Jewish Communists were denouncing the Zionists as "reactionaries" who "don't believe in the Fatherland Front."

That summer, Bulgarian Zionists traveled to London for the World Zionist Organization meeting.

Ben-Gurion repeated his call for the creation of a Jewish state.

Three million Jews would be needed to make aliyah in the next five years,...

Dimitur Peshev had been spared. The former vice president of the wartime parliament had done more than perhaps anyone to spare Bulgaria's forty-seven thousand Jews;

In May 1947,

Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations,

stunned Zionists, the United States, and Great Britain by suggesting in a speech to the General Assembly that the Soviet Union would...

On November 30, 1947, when word arrived that the Soviets had joined the United States in supporting the UN plan to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, celebrations broke out in cities across Bulgaria.

This was the same news that the Khairis had greeted with shock and disbelief in al-Ramla.

The new Soviet support for a Jewish state meant the Bulgarian government would back emigration for those Jews wishing to leave.

By May 14, as Ben-Gurion declared Israel's independence and the war between the Arabs and the Jews officially began,

Uganda.

The Uganda idea was met with hostility from Herzl's fellow Zionists, and after Herzl died in 1904, the Zionist movement focused on Palestine as the goal and intensified their discussions with the Ottoman sultan.

In the end, however, World War I would bring about the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Britain's entry into Palestine, and the 1917 Balfour Declaration, with its promise to help establish a "Jewish national home."

the dreams of the "Jewish Jules Verne" had become reality.

Dalmatian coast

kilim;

Despite the conflict, many Jewish intellectuals in Palestine had argued that Israel's long-term survival depended on finding a way to coexist with the Arabs.

Moshe was part of a Zionist organization that had advocated a binational democratic state for all the people of Palestine. The binational idea had taken root in the 1920s with the formation of Brit Shalom, or Covenant for Peace, which advocated "understanding between Jews and Arabs . . . on the basis of the absolute political equality of two culturally autonomous peoples. . . .

desire to preserve "the ethical integrity of the Z...

Arthur Ruppin, a founder of Brit Shalom, declared, "I have no doubt that Zionism will be heading toward a catastrophe if it will no...

The spiritual father of coexistence was...

"the love for their homeland that the two peoples share."

Mapam.

November 4, passengers were crowded toward the